$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.

Lenin ended any oppurtunity for none CPSU members to be elected to the Soviets and banned factions in the CPSU in 1921. He then eliminated opposition with the Cheka. Even before that the Communists acted under “war communism”, which meant killing anybody not 100% in line. That very much included Machnos work in setting up a Soviet Democracy in Ukraine, due to them being Anarchists. Stalin then abolished the Soviets in 1936.

The Soviet Union had a bit of it, in the very beginning, but it failed and turned into a statist dictatorship. That is why Stalin ordered the Anarchists to be killed in Spain as well, the Prague Spring got crushed due to moving into a more democratic direction as well as many other movements of worker uprisings.

Socialism means collective ownership of the means of production. The issue with the Soviet Union was that all means of production were controlled by the state. However there was no way in which the people controlled the state, since at least 1936 and argueably earlier then that.

5.6%of GNP is well above the 2% inflation rate and France economy is also not growing fast at forecasted 0.7%.

Cancer missspelled in Vietnamese.

https://vi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ung_thư

I am not saying media is not bias, but that some media just spins the truth, whereas others do not have a problem with fslse reporting. After all tankies are called tsnkies, because they ignored that the Soviets used tanks to violently get rid of the Prague Spring. This happens on the left as well.

And yes that is why I like reading economics news websites like the economist. They report on subjects left leaning news tend to not care about, but which can be incredibly important. Also with rich people using their reporting as a bases for invedtments, makes it hugely important that they do not outright lie. Commentary on them is horrible though, unless they go somewhat agsinst the neoliberal norm, which is rarer, but usually some of the best stuff.

False neutrality is propaganda, but so is being so is being activly biased. So a good left news source has to be wiling to show the fscts, when they speak against the left.

Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.

So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.

There are big money donors, which are not billionaires. The most common one are unions.

No

Seriously in Europe many investment funds activly go to the unions and ask which problems the company have. They are often better informed and honest then the normal management. They also have an obvious intresst in keeping the company around.

The thing is that the value is in the communities and not in the old content. So most likely the mods would just post we move to a new instance and a lot of users would follow. We just saw that on the German speakin lemmy instance feddit.de, which was abandoned and now most of the users and communities moved to feddit.org, which is already one of the larger ones.

What lemmy really needs is the ability to easily move accounts and communities. Mastodon has that for users already.

!europe!europe@feddit.org comes to mind as a somewhat political community, with a non US focus. It however has a lot of Germans in it.

Oil companies usually do not, but electricity companies do. The problem is that oil companies are great in geology, drilling and chemistry. Geothermal is a similar skill set and chemistry can be used in other products, but the first is small business and the other not renewable nexessarily.

Nearly all of it is Autobahn. It is basically just road work slowing you down and even that is not too bad.

Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.

That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.